Who Supports Suicide Terrorism in Bangladesh? What the Data Say
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Politics and Religion, page 1 of 40, 2017. © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, 2017 doi:10.1017/S1755048317000347 1755-0483/17 Who Supports Suicide Terrorism in Bangladesh? What the Data Say C. Christine Fair, Ali Hamza, and Rebecca Heller Georgetown University Abstract: Bangladesh, one of the world’s largest Muslim countries, is generally viewed as a success story with a strong tradition of secular democracy. Unfortunately, this assertion rests on a weak empirical foundation. Since becoming independent from Pakistan in 1971, democracy and secularism have been consistently undermined. Moreover, since 2000 Bangladesh has experienced more than 100 incidents of Islamist terrorism. More recently, the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent have assaulted religious and ethnic minorities as well as secular and liberal activists. While these turns of events are alarming, Islamist militancy in Bangladesh remains understudied. In this article, we address this lacuna by undertaking regression analysis of recent Pew Research Center survey data to exposit the determinants of popular support of Islamist terrorism. With this study, we hope other scholars will be motivated to turn their attention to this increasingly important state. 1. INTRODUCTION: ISLAMIST MILITANCY IN BANGLADESH In March 2014, Dan Mozena, then the United States Ambassador to Bangladesh, said that Bangladesh is “a moderate and generally secular and tolerant — though sometimes this is getting stretched at the moment — alternative to violent extremism in a very troubled part of We are very grateful to Rebecca Littman, Elizabeth Nugent, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Neil Malhotra whose collaborations on Pakistan-related projects yielded important insights for this paper. We are also thankful to Ali Riaz and Alyssa Ayres for their comments on an early draft of this essay as well as the trenchant criticisms offered by the various anonymous reviewers. Despite the efforts and interventions of these varied persons, we alone are responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation. Finally, this project could not be possible with the support of the Georgetown Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, which sponsored the work of Ms. Heller, or the unstinting support of the Security Studies Program, which supported the work of Mr. Hamza. Address correspondence and reprint requests to: C. Christine Fair, Georgetown University, Security Studies Program in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, 202 Mortara Building, 37th and O Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20057. E-mail: [email protected]. 1 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 73.180.230.14, on 28 Jun 2017 at 15:38:25, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755048317000347 2 Fair, Hamza, and Hell the world” (Gowen 2014). While Mozena’s statement reflects the general perception that Bangladesh is a success story of a moderate, secular, Muslim democracy, this view never rested on strong empirical ground. Indeed, since Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971, the dura- bility of both secularism and democracy has been undermined by numer- ous military coups — many of which involved multiple counter-coups before a clear “victor” emerged — in 1974–1975, 1977–1980, 1981– 1982, 1996, and 2007. (In 2012, the military announced that it had thwarted yet another coup in January of that year.) Bangladesh’stwo mainstream political parties, the left-of-center Awami League led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the right-of-center Bangladesh National Party (BNP) led by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, are known more for their rivalry, corruption, and incompetence than for good governance. Since independence, Bangladesh has experienced creeping Islamism that enjoys popular support (Fair and Oldmixon 2015). Increasingly, Bangladesh is the site of Islamist violence. According to data derived from the Global Terrorism Database maintained by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), there have been 944 terrorist attacks between 2000 and 2015. While the perpetrators of the majority of events in the Global Terrorism Database are listed as “unknown” or attributed to political parties, 114 were perpetrated by confirmed Islamist militant groups. However, the victim yields for these attacks are quite low with an average of one fatality and under seven persons wounded per attack. These low victim yields may explain in part why this kind of violence in Bangladesh has attracted little attention. By way of contrast, using the same dataset, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, in the same period, has perpetrated 136 attacks killing about six persons and wounding another 14 per attack in India. Perhaps if Bangladeshi ter- rorist groups were more lethal, they would garner more attention. More recently, the Islamic State (IS) and Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) have claimed many of these attacks (Kumar and Iyengar 2016), casting a further pall over Bangladesh’ ostensible success story. We aver that Bangladesh merits greater scholarly attention. After all, Bangladesh has one of the world’s largest Muslim populations with more than 150 million Muslims.1 Bangladesh’s Muslim population exceeds the combined populaces of Iran (81.2 million), Afghanistan (32.6 million), and Saudi Arabia (27.7 million) (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency 2016a; 2016b; 2016c). But it is also one of the world’s least developed countries: Bangladesh ranks 142 out of 190 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 73.180.230.14, on 28 Jun 2017 at 15:38:25, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755048317000347 Who Supports Suicide Terrorism in Bangladesh? 3 countries according to the United Nations Human Development Index (United Nations Development Program 2015). Its citizens also view their country as plagued by corruption, ranking 139 out of 167 countries ranked in Transparency International’s 2015 Corruption Perception Index (Transparency International 2016). Bangladesh is an important provider of global security, consistently being one of the largest contributors to United Nations Peacekeeping Missions (United Nations 2016).2 While not a top- tier military, its military forces are ranked 52 out of 126, using an index that considers the forces’ end-strength, diversity and number of weapons systems as well as measures of national power (Global Fire Power 2016).3 Whereas the origins of Islamist militancy and support for the same are fairly well characterized in other Muslim countries, these issues have not been explored empirically in Bangladesh. To address this lacuna, we employ data for Bangladesh from the Pew Research Center’s World’s Muslims Data Set to conduct an ordinary least squares regression analysis on Bangladeshi support for suicide terrorism using a set of theoretically derived independent and control variables. We find that support for suicide attacks is rather high in Bangladesh with almost half of the popu- lation finding them justified in some measure. Levels of justification for suicide attacks in Bangladesh are considerably higher than in most other Muslim countries studied by the Pew Research Center. We find that respondents who support literal interpretations of the Quran, including physical criminal punishments (known as Hudood punishments), are more likely to support suicide terrorism whereas respondents who support traditional roles of Muslim leaders (e.g., settling family disputes) are less likely to do so. We also find that males and those who view them- selves as economically well-off are more supportive of suicide attacks, whereas those who are better educated are less supportive. We organize the remainder of this article as follows. In Section 2, we provide an overview of the Islamist militant landscape in Bangladesh. In Section 3, we review the theoretical and empirical literature on the determinants of support for Islamist violence from which we draw out several testable hypotheses. In Sections 4 and 5, respectively, we describe the data and methods that we employ in this analysis and present our empirical findings. In Section 6, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research. Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 73.180.230.14, on 28 Jun 2017 at 15:38:25, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755048317000347 4 Fair, Hamza, and Hell 2. ISLAMIST MILITANT MILIEU IN BANGLADESH Three complex international developments have enabled the growth of Islamist militancy in Bangladesh. First, during the 1980s, some Bangladeshis participated in the so-called “jihad” to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan where they learned to fight. Returning militants brought with them their new knowledge of insurgent warfare and jihadist ideology to Bangladesh (Hasan 2011). Bangladesh received about 15% of its bilateral development assistance aid from the United States in the 1980s and because the United States vigorously supported the efforts in Afghanistan (along with Saudi Arabia and China), Bangladesh tolerated its citizens traveling to and from Afghanistan to fight (Hasan 2012). Second, in the early 1980s, Muslim ethnic Rohingyas (International Crisis Group 2014) formed the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) in the wake of a massive military operation waged by the Myanmar military